To determine whether family, peer, and school variables are associated with divergent heroin-use patterns or career outcomes, we interviewed 183 black male heroin addicts, experimenters, and non-heroin users from Chicago's south side. While subgroup differences on socio-familial variables generally were not statistically significant, we did observe a number of trends in the expected direction. For example, addicts were more likely than experimenters or nonusers to come from broken homes, to have friends who were involved in serious types of drug use and other illegal activities, and to drop out of high school. At the same time, the pervasiveness of some of our measures of "social disharmony" across the sample suggest that, at least in some inner-city black neighborhoods, these patterns are perhaps becoming the norm.